Spectre Creative

The Blog

Marketing Buzzwords and What they Mean

Marketing Buzzwords and What they Mean.

Marketing is wonderful. It’s impossible to get past how much incredible opportunity that exists when you start telling people about your product or service. However, it can be hard to manage your business and manage a successful marketing campaign. What most people opt to do is to bring in a successful marketing company to create a campaign and run it on behalf of the company.

However, we know, as a marketing company that we sometimes use ‘buzzwords’. If you are new to working with a marketing company this list of the top marketing ‘buzzwords’ should make your life easier when approaching a new marketing firm.

Brand Identity

Brand identity is the image that is created for a company that comprises of your copy, tone of voice, colour palette and visual style.

KPI

Key Performance Indicators are personally crafted goals that are used as a measurement to evaluate performance. This is not a new word or even a word that is restricted to marketers but nonetheless one that can be used regularly.

Clickbait

Clickbait is an obtuse headline and image that has the sole purpose of getting you to click through to the article. The article is normally subpar and doesn’t actually have any valuable content or even the story that you clicked on with interest in the first place. Examples of headlines would normally come in the form of “This article will help you make money… number 7 will change your life”.

Contextual Marketing

Contextual Marketing is an advertisement that is placed in a surrounding that will provide benefit to the user. For example, if you are booking a holiday and you see an advert for a car rental company you are witnessing contextual marketing.

Disruptor

A disruptor is a company that is the bad man/woman of that sector. They ride in with a game-changing product or service, disrupt that traditional market and force everyone to change.

Companies that are disruptors are Uber, McDonald’s (in the early days), Apple (with the iPhone).

Don’t be fooled by people calling themselves industry disruptors. This is something that the market dictates, not the individual.

Big Data

Big data is a huge collection of structured and unstructured data. As we gather more and more information from multiple different streams (mobile, apps, websites etc) companies need to find ways to organise and understand this information.

Freemium

Freemium is a pricing strategy that gives a product or service away for free with pricing inside the app or website that you need to pay for to unlock true functionality.

Some examples of this are Mailchimp where you can use the service but to get the extended functionality you need to pay. Others include Dropbox who give you 2GB for free and need to pay to get more.

UGC

User Generated content is something that has become extremely popular with larger brands. It is sharing and marketing customer fan art, social posts or testimonials as a way of showing their strong customer relationship and that they care.

Gamification

Gamification is the process of turning a piece of software or marketing into a game to encourage users to progress to the desired objective. Companies like Code Academy and LinkedIn are very good at this. They both use badges, progress bars etc to encourage the user to complete their profile and spend more time on their site.

Millennials

Millennials are a generation born between the 1980’s and 2000’s. This is an odd one as it’s the categorization of an entire group of people. Questions often asked are how to please them, how to appeal to them and how to sell to them.

Mobile Optimization

This is the outcome of people now living 24/7 next to their mobile device. Phones, Tablets and small laptops.

Mobile Optimization is making your website’s/application work on these devices (no more pinching to zoom and move around desktop sites on your phone.

Hyperlocal

Hyperlocal is marketers taking advantage of GPS to target audiences based on where they are. Advertising a restaurant when they are close to the restaurant’s location.

Web Personalisation

This involves marketers using customer history with a brand to personalise web pages. You see this with companies like Amazon where you see items related to previous purchases. Also with companies like Netflix where you are recommended new programming and movies based on what you have watched before.

Netiquette

I like this one. Its basically the word for online manner and I love manners.

Omnichannel Marketing

This is all-around marketing war. Social advertising, brick and mortar, online and mobile all in one. Showing your product or service to everyone.

Paid Placement

Paid advertising basically. Facebook killed brand pages with organic reach so paid advertising on facebook and google is a solid choice for businesses looking to expand their reach.

Retargeting

Retargeting is showing advertisements to customers who have left your site without making a purchase. It’s a way of herding back people who maybe put something in the shopping cart and left before purchase. Just a friendly, if slightly creepy reminder.

Second Screen

This marketing concept is simple. People tend to use two screens, if watching the tv they may have their mobile phone in their hand on social media. This is mixing the content on one screen with the content on the little screen. You can see this in action with shows on ITV where they have voting through a mobile application for reality tv shows or game shows. It can also be seen when a TV show advertises a twitter hashtag to ‘take part in the conversation online’.

Transparency

Transparency has become a new buzzword since companies realised that people don’t like being lied to. It’s a step in the right direction.

Pain Points

No, it’s not the pain in your shoulder that marketers are talking about. It is all about your customers. What they struggle with and how to make their experience better. It’s about solving your customer’s problems to be able to sell better to them.

YMMV

Your mileage may vary. You see this in marketing case studies. Sometimes implying that there was an element of luck involved and that following a similar plan may not yield the same results.

That is the end of our helpful buzzword list. We hope you enjoyed learning some new words. If you know of any that we missed or have heard one recently that you were unsure of please let us know!

Next time you end up in a conversation with a marketer you will be well equipped!